To keep the world's oil taps turned on, energy companies are in a race to find more fossil fuels. That means the petroleum geologists who scout the stuff are hot commodities, demanding pay increases and often jumping ship for better offers, more stock options and fat bonus checks.

"We have yet to hire half of the geoscientists we will need to run the company in 2015," Tim Cejka, president of Exxon Mobil Exploration, told a lunchtime audience.

Last year, the average petroleum geologist earned 16 percent more than in 2004, according to a recent survey by Tulsa's MLA Resources, which conducts the annual study for the association.

Typical young graduates are landing an average $74,400 a year to start. Industry veterans with at least 25 years of experience are pulling down an average $134,100 a year, but many draw salaries of $200,000 or more, according to the survey.

Charles Taylor, vice president of technical headhunting firm TIG First Source, said with so few unemployed people in the energy industry, companies are pilfering each other's personnel.

"They're happy. They're in a six-figure job already. They're not on the Internet looking. A search firm like ours has to tap them on the shoulder," he said.

Wanted: Young folks

It's a far cry from 20 years ago, when energy outfits were casting off these highly skilled professionals like so many used up drill bits.

The energy industry's history of relentlessly chopping their roster of talent over the last two decades has had a compounding effect and has come back in the form of one major headache.

As a group, petroleum geologists, like so many other technical professionals inside the energy industry, are getting older just as the hunt for more oil and gas is reaching a new level of intensity.

Worse, the supply of eager young professionals going into the business is limited.

Options preferred

Andrew Petter, a doctoral candidate in geology at the University of Texas in Austin who's attending the conference in Houston this week said he's been approached by several midsize energy companies that have encouraged him to sign a letter of intent to come work for them when he graduates.

But Petter has another 2 1/2 years of full-time course work to complete before his degree.

"I'd prefer to have all my options on the table," said Petter, who's thinking about his next internship, not a full-time job.

War for talent

With so much money on the table for newbies, salary compression can quickly disgruntle professionals who have been putting in their time for 10 or 20 years, warned Mark Anderson, president of Norwalk, Conn.-based ExecuNet.

"There's a war for talent, and if companies don't address this now and on an ongoing basis, they'll lose good people because they haven't treated them adequately," he said, adding that most people don't leave jobs for money alone. Feeling unappreciated and like they've hit a wall in terms of career development also contribute.

Moving quickly

Recruiters working for major and midsize oil companies — from Kerr-McGee to Saudi Aramco — are trolling the floors in the hopes of luring qualified geologists and geophysicists to their own 3-D visualization and modeling labs.

Ceri Powell, Shell's vice president of exploration in the Middle East, Caspian and South Asia, said her company is trying to band together the highly segmented geologists, geophysicists and reservoir engineers to make new discoveries in record time and wring more out of older fields.

Energy companies are used to thinking in geologic time, but Powell said now time is of the essence.

For example, Shell has been exploring for oil and gas in Oman for more than 40 years — and with a lot of success. But new exploration contracts in Libya were granted for just seven years.